Claudia Benitez-Nelson, College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor, Marine Science Program and Department of Earth & Ocean Sciences at the University of South Carolina, will be one of the Plenary speakers.

Announcements

Below is a list of press conferences to be held at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting.

The following schedule of events is subject to change before or during the meeting. Press events may be added or dropped, their titles and emphases may change and participants may change. Updates, changes and additions to the press events schedule will be posted in the Press Conference tab in the Media Center.

All press events will take place in the Press Room (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, Room 214). Times are listed in Central Standard Time. All press events will be streamed live over the web. Click on the “Webstreaming” tab in the Media Center for further information.

More than 80 percent of the world’s fish stocks are exploited or over-exploited due to expansion of commercial fishing over the past several decades. Many fish stocks can recover, however, when fisheries implement sustainable management practices. Here, experts will present new ways that ocean science data can be used to make commercial fisheries more efficient and sustainable as well as new data on how climate affects fisheries worldwide.

About 500 million people around the world live on deltas, making coastal land loss one of the biggest social and environmental challenges globally. Perhaps nowhere is the issue more apparent than in Louisiana, which loses about a football field of wetlands every hour. Leading experts in coastal geology, ecology and engineering will present new information about coastal land loss in Louisiana and around the world, and report on new research to potentially address this global problem.

Marshes in coastal Louisiana: five years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Tuesday February 23
11 a.m. CST

Much of the research following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill focused on offshore, deep-water ecosystems, but a group of scientists have been looking at the effects the spill had on coastal marshes – wetlands that have a long history of oil exploration, high rates of erosion and tropical storm activity. A panel of experts will present new information about how salt marshes in coastal Louisiana have responded to the spill. They will discuss the effects on different marsh species like insects and fish, and how the oil has behaved in these areas, including new information that could help scientists track this spill and others.